They are supposed to have lived together with Turkic communities before they occupied the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century. Over four hundred loanwords from Turkic languages attest to the close ties that bound early Hungarians to an amalgam of Turkic peoples. Pechenegs and Qumans found refuge in the Hungarian Kingdom from the 10th century and though they slowly melted into Hungarians, place names at various parts of the country and Turkic loanwords in the Hungarian language still preserve their memory.
A couple of centuries later, beginning with the early 16th century, Hungary was occupied by Ottoman forces for more than 150 years. Though Ottomans were forced to leave in the late 17th century, the few buildings that still can be seen today and a group of Turkish cultural words remind Hungarians of a shared past. With these antecedents, it was quite natural that the early interest in the history and culture of Turkic peoples developed into a branch of the national scholarly disciplines in Hungary by the 19th century.
You can learn more about the topic in the book-album "The Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences" (Volume XLII) in the series "The Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan".
The general sponsor of the project is the oilfield services company Eriell-Group.